They Call Me Crazy Eights

By David Patrick Curd Sr.

They Call Me Crazy Eights

After years in a Louisiana state hospital, Eli Ray Dugas comes home to Saint Bartholomew Parish - the town that gave him a nickname instead of a name and a story instead of a life.

The story goes like this: a poker game, a locked room, a boy who couldn't stop counting things that didn't add up. The town has been telling it for thirty years. Eli has been carrying it longer than that.

Then the men from that night start dying. Each body comes with a playing card. Each card points back to him.

The sheriff watches too closely. Old records appear before he asks for them. A cassette tape surfaces with voices rehearsing a lie. A locked door in a burned building holds a child's shoe and something that rattles. And somewhere in the gap between what Eli remembers and what Saint Bart insists happened, a dead boy's truth has been waiting in the only place men never thought to look - in the objects women kept, the receipts they saved, the cloth they refused to wash clean.

They Call Me Crazy Eights is a Southern Gothic noir about what a town buries when it runs out of places to hide, and what it costs a man to dig with his bare hands.

For readers of S.A. Cosby, Tom Franklin, and Nic Pizzolatto.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4QMLHPH
• ISBN13: 9798180865236
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"